In this video an elder states that disfellowshipping is a congregational matter and not a family matter and that Jehovah’s Witnesses don’t use the word ‘shunning’.

He talks positively about disfellowshipping saying that “for every six or ten people you bring on here that have bad experiences [with disfellowshipping] I can bring a hundred people that have been disfellowshipped … who will say it is the best thing that happened in their life”. Watch the video! Read the rest »

A man filmed the announcement of his Disfellowshipment made by two Jehovah’s Witness elders who came at his door. Watch the video! Read the rest »

Two brothers, Jason and Johel Woodliff, came back from Iraq with their comrades in a Marine Corps battalion that lost 48 members, greeted by a mile-long parade attended by thousands of strangers. But not by their family.

The brothers, their parents and J.R. Brown, director of public information for the Watchtower Bible Tract Society, all speak out about Jehovah’s Witnesses and military service. Read the rest »

Disfellowshipped Dasun Allah, editor of the hip-hop magazine The Source and now member of the Islam-based Nation of Gods and Earths, “tagged” the assembly hall to expose the religion’s “hypocrisy.” Read the rest »

Personal testimonies from unstructured interviews with former members reveal that leaving the movement is characterised by emotional trauma and existential insecurity.  The data also suggest that defectors often come to replace their Witness weltanschauung with a new religious identity that enables them to renegotiate their relationship with the modern world. The paper advances the argument, however, that these alternative systems of belief do not represent a fundamentally different reality and tend to affirm the basic view that modern secular society is soulless and hostile. Read the rest »